Honey Dance

Burt Shavitz, whose woodcut image forms the logo of Burt’s Bees, is an unlikely emblem of balms and unguents. The seventy-nine-year-old hippie from Parkman, Maine, has a cross-grained disposition, a Civil War beard, and manifestly unmoisturized skin. When asked if he uses any Burt’s products, he said, “No.” Then, perhaps recalling his corporate obligations, he added, “Well, as needed.”

Long before he came to stand for woodsy exfoliation, Shavitz lived in Manhattan and took photographs for Time and Life. The other day, he returned to the city for the première of “Burt’s Buzz,” a documentary about his long, strange trip, and he visited his old apartment building, at Ninety-second and Third. Save for a Starbucks downstairs, it looked much the same as it did when he moved in, in 1959: a scruffy brick square laden with fire escapes, a stockade for the once hopeful.

Wearing bulbous sunglasses that gave him a beelike aspect, Shavitz stood by the building’s back alley, where he used to park his motorcycle, and remarked that his rent had been just thirty dollars. A week, or a month? “Maybe both,” he said. “There was a girl one floor up used to have sex with cabdrivers to pay her fare.” He pointed out the apartment across the way where he’d once heard a couple fighting: “The woman threw every pot and pan she had against the wall, then took her clothes off and did a dance in front of the venetian blind. Then: silence. They left town that night and never came back.”

Out front, he noted the spikes on the lintels and said, “None of this pigeon-killer stuff was here.” He gestured to an apartment complex across Third Avenue, the Ruppert Yorkville Towers, and added, “And that used to be the Ruppert brewery. The workers could drink from taps on the walls, and, because of all the grain, a river of rats ran down the streets at night. It was a magic town. But, you know . . . ” He held a photograph he’d snapped of an elderly neighbor staring dourly out her window, framed by dingy curtains. “As soon as I took this shot, I knew that that would be me, ninety years old and unable to go outside, if I didn’t get the hell out. I borrowed a van from a former girlfriend, packed up everything I needed—my bed, what clothes I had, an orange crate of books—and disappeared into the declining sun.” When was that? “Possibly it was the sixties. If I get some peace and quiet, I can lay that on you.” (He left in 1970.)

He crossed the street to the Third Avenue Ale House, saying, “This used to be an Irish bar, with fights every night. Paddy the bartender would say, ‘Make his eyes pop out, William. Choke him a little bit more!’ ” But the marble counter, the terrazzo floor, and the pugilistic atmosphere were gone, replaced by “Good-Hearted Woman” on the speakers and six TV screens. When Shavitz began wiggling his hips, Kyle Folsom, a friend of Shavitz’s who’d accompanied him to the city, laughed and said, “You can tell Burt doesn’t have a TV, because he’s dancing not to the music but to the female announcer on ESPN.”

Shavitz finally sat and told the Burt’s Bees story, starting with building his hives—“It’s a way to make a living if you’ve got a strong back and a strong mind and good eyes”—and then, in 1984, meeting a single mother named Roxanne Quimby, who was camped by Lake Wassookeag. “She was man-hungry,” he recalled, “and she and I, by spells, fed the hunger.” Quimby and Shavitz began selling his honey, then candles from his beeswax, and finally—in a masterstroke—his motorcycle-riding, golden-retriever-raising life style. In 1999, Quimby bought Shavitz out for about a hundred and thirty thousand dollars; eight years later, the company was sold to Clorox for $913 million.

Shavitz remains vexed at Quimby—“I haven’t spoken to her in quite a while, and I don’t care if I never do”—but continues to make appearances for Burt’s new owners: “Except for the fact that they’re from Clorox, they’re nice people.” And, all in all, he said, missing out on millions wasn’t a big hassle. (Quimby says that she later gave Shavitz an additional four million dollars.) “I’ve got everything I need: a nice piece of land with hawks and owls and incredible sunsets, and the good will of my neighbors.”

Folsom pulled up a photograph of Shavitz’s farmhouse on his phone: “He stands in that second-floor doorway and shoots his gun at the tin cans in that tree.”

“It’s my shooting gallery.”

“It’s also your bathroom,” Folsom observed. “In the winter, I see a big yellow circle under there.”

“I do fertilize things,” Shavitz said. “It’s a gift I have. I should put the stuff in a bottle and charge for it!” ♦